1. Amazon Sideswipe

Many of our efforts in retail have been put on hold as we’ve been continually challenged by Amazon Launchpad. If you haven’t heard, despite their original verbal promise to not advertise or sell our Coolest Cooler below our retail price, Amazon is now selling the Coolest at $224.99. This is $175 OFF the retail price of $399. This is disastrous for us.

We shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. Amazon Launchpad has been the worstcompany to deal with despite their claims to help startups. We wish we never got involved with them as they have significantly delayed and harmed our ability to serve you. To be clear, the sale we made last year to Amazon Launchpad helped generate the revenue to ship additional backers units this year, but what they’ve done since has ended up hurting us (and you).

Here’s what happened. First, they started selling our product two weeks before the agreed upon sell date without notifying us. We found out they started selling after the fact, and you probably remember this created a lot of angry comments and frustration from many Backers. Then last year, they started testing lower sale prices without our permission. (The Launchpad team had verbally promised that other than price matching they would not drop our price without our agreement.)

Earlier this year, they threatened to return their inventory if we wouldn’t agree to pay Amazon $120 per unit so they could sell the Coolest at $299. It made no sense. When we wouldn’t agree to their terms for a proposed return, our account manager at Amazon threatened they would “burn us to the ground.”

We can’t guess about Amazon’s intentions but the threats were real and their actions are hurting us. Maybe they thought having a firesale of their inventory would help us somehow? But unfortunately, at the crazy low price they are selling at, we can’t compete and we can’t generate the profit needed to make you more coolers. We currently can’t make and ship a Coolest Cooler for the price Amazon is selling them for, so until they readjust price or blow through their remaining 5k units, our sales will be much slower.

Here’s how Amazon Launchpad marketed themselves to us and why we got involved: (see their site).

How are Amazon Launchpad startups treated differently than other Amazon vendors?

We appreciate that startups have different needs than more established companies. Amazon Launchpad has been designed to meet these needs while giving you the marketing benefits typically reserved for our more established Amazon vendors, right from day one

2. Expense Sideswipe

This one really has really been frustrating, as well as expensive and time consuming.

At last count, we’ve had ~200 backers file complaints with the Oregon Department of Justice (DOJ). They usually say — without context to the Kickstarter terms of service, any of our updates, or any of our shipping policies — something like, “Hey, I bought a cooler two years ago from these people and they refuse to send it.” Obviously, if you’ve read our updates, you know that’s not the truth. We aren’t refusing to send Coolests - we can’t afford to and we lack inventory and resources to fulfill all Backer units. We’ve been very clear about our continual efforts in all our updates and are following Kickstarter terms of service.

Unfortunately, we’ve had to spend tremendous resources in legal fees and man hours to deal with these complaints. We’re a small team and we can deal with only so many issues. I'm sad to say that it’s these Backers who took needless action against us who are hurting the Backer community the most. Their legal complaints have cost us real money that should have been spent shipping Rewards.

Worse, they stomped on the very premise of Kickstarter. Kickstarter is not a store. It’s a way to bring creative projects to life. It is a platform that allows creators and backers to come together to fund a project, and a platform that allows the community to engage and support the project as it comes to life over time. You can't 'buy' anything on Kickstarter. You back a project, hope for the best, and wait for the process to complete. Yes, it’s taking us longer than we expected but we were the most massive project in Kickstarter history, our product was tremendously complex, and we’ve hit a lot of snags. And yet we work everyday to keep making this happen and we've never stopped working for you guys.

Still, we’ve been forced to spend countless hours responding to these complaints, not to mention preparing documents and answering all manner of questions from the DOJ to help educate them on the position we’re in as a company.

We’ve cooperated fully with the DOJ and they will see we’ve done nothing wrong. As you know, we ran out of the original funds a long, long time ago because this is a HUGE project and it cost more to make Coolests than we took in during the Kickstarter campaign. That’s the reason we are here, and why we are selling retail units to earn the money necessary to create and ship to our Backers. We’ve been surviving on retail sales, loans, and hard work for a long time and despite our continual updates about this some people just can’t understand that we don’t have unlimited resources and they decide to file these costly and baseless complaints.

For every impatient complaint filed, we lose more money and our very ability to serve Backers all becomes endangered. We know you want us to go faster, but we’re doing the best we can. Filing complaints doesn’t help us go faster - it hurts us and it prevents the whole community from getting what they want.

So far we've survived long past the time the Kickstarter funds ran out, and we’ve done nothing but work hard, put ourselves at risk to make this happen for you, and communicate about the journey openly and honestly. I'm certain other people would have managed this process differently, and still other people would have quit after the money ran out. We took loans, sought investors, came up with out-of-the-box solutions and retail options that were working to get you units. Everyday we keep working for you. I know most of you are rooting for us, but it's frustrating so many people don’t understand the struggle.

Moving Forward.

One of the best parts about backing a campaign is watching manufacturing challenges be met and overcome, and seeing a new product come to life. From day one of these updates, I’ve always been committed to sharing as much as possible of the development of the Coolest Cooler.

As I was looking back on the updates from the development stage, and re-reading some of the Coolest/Countdown weekly blog posts, I feel like we really accomplished the manufacturing updates part. You’ve watched us figure out the sourcing, logistics, manufacturing part. We’ve made the Coolest a reality and as you can see online tens of thousands enjoyed their Coolests this summer.

At this point we have the production issues solved, and there really isn’t any more to discuss on that front. It’s now all about the money. We’ll either raise additional investment capital, or we won’t. We’ll either sell more units more quickly each month, or we won’t. We'll of course still share major events with you as they happen, but this is why moving forward we'll be sharing updates on a quarterly timeframe.

This isn’t being done to ignore anyone, but rather so we can better serve you in the most meaningful way… By focusing our time on finding new ways to sell more units so we can make/ship more Coolest Rewards.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this first month of Fall and that you’ll keep your faith and patience with us as we work everyday to do what’s right and get you your Coolest Rewards. I’ll update you next quarter.

-Ryan